Embracing Queer Body Horror
On 'Titane,' 'The Skin I Live In' and queer art being transgressive by nature.
I finally watched Titane last week. Although it wasn’t playing anywhere near me before hitting on-demand streaming, I'd heard plenty about Raw (2016) director Julia Ducornau’s sophomore feature, which became one of the year’s buzziest new releases after winning the Palme d’Or in July. As a fan of the cannibalistic coming-of-age drama that was her debut, I expected this movie to be wild. That still didn’t prepare me for what ended up being the strangest, most inventive piece of narrative fiction I’ve come across in 2021.
Titane focuses on Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a sexually fluid erotic dancer who is on the run after committing a string of grisly murders. In order to remain undiscovered, she disguises herself as a missing person — the adult version of a boy named Adrien who disappeared 10 years ago. She then turns herself in to the police who contact Adrien’s father, an aging firefighter named Vincent (Vincent Legrand).
By some miracle, her disguise (shaved brows; a binded chest, haircut and self-inflicted broken nose) works, with Vincent claiming to recognize Adrien and taking them home. So begin a series of awkward dynamics between the two, as they form a bond that’s somehow endearing and disturbing in equal measure. The film treads into body horror territory when Alexia gets impregnated by — wait for it — an automobile.
Titane is a film that blurs concepts of gender, sexual orientation and even chemical composition as we know them. Rather than making the protagonist easy-to-root-for vigilante who murders evil men in a done-before feminist allegory, Ducornau made a character that was, in her own words, “impossible to like” or sympathize with.
“Do we really have to have main characters that are morally acceptable to us? I obviously do not think so; that would be incredibly reductive,” she explained in an interview with the L.A. Times. “What I thought is that if the audience can’t relate morally to her then I’m going to make them relate to her body.”
In a concise yet brilliant piece for Autostraddle, transgender critic Drew Gregory celebrated Titane for refusing to take the simple route, instead choosing to break binaries and explore gender in all of its messy complexity.
“This is not a trans film but it is a film about gender and isn’t that the same thing?” she wrote. “Being trans is body horror, because being a person is body horror… All people are artificial. We cut protein filaments off our scalp and this changes who we are.”
In the days after seeing Titane, I got to thinking about queer art in the context of extreme cinema — or more specifically, the New French Extremity movement. Referring to a turn-of-the-century trend with roots in art house and horror cinema, the New French Extreme is most commonly known for its transgressive nature, often depicting the body as a vessel to explore humanity through sex and violence. Popular examples include Claire Denis’ Trouble Every Day (2001) and Pascal Laugier’s Martyrs (2008), both of which concern themselves with gender identity and depict acts of severe cruelty. The latter — about two girlfriends who seek revenge on the cultists who tortured one of them as a child — has been described by its director as a film about the nature of pain and by fans as a story of queer affirmation.
Although the French Extremity movement refers to transgressive French cinema from the last two decades, some critics and scholars have noted movies like Srđan Spasojević’s A Serbian Film (2009), Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (2011) and the work of Danish auteur Lars von Trier as part of a greater European Extremity movement not limited to one country. On the heels of the 2010s, Ducournau is one of many auteurs who continues to make films in this vein to widespread success and controversy, with Gaspar Noé’s Climax (2018) being another recent example.
There are several reasons why the European Extremity movement often deals with LGBTQ+ subject matter. Body horror has always been a great venue to explore deviant narratives, yes, but I think the root of this trend lies in queer art being transgressive by definition. That’s because in a heteronormative society, the very act of being queer is considered transgressive. From classic horror to the 1990s’ New Queer Cinema wave, decades-worth of cinematic trends outside of European Extremity movement prove this as well.
Although Titane has been lauded by many for its nuanced take on family, identity and paternal love, a handful of viewers have taken it upon themselves to condemn its transgressive approach. In a review for Indiewire, critic Jude Dry called it “a deeply misogynist movie with a healthy side of transphobia,” arguing that the film uses “iconography of transmasculine transition” such as chest binding and steroid injections to macabre effect.
While it’s easy to see where they’re coming from as the Ace bandages do leave ugly scars on Alexia, these are only a small fraction of the changes her body undergoes — many of which are involuntary. In fact, most of the lacerations on her bust go in the opposite direction of the bandages, appearing and disappearing at random over the course of the film as part of a repeated body horror gimmick. Meanwhile, the steroids Dry mentions are taken not by Alexia but by Vincent, further emphasizing the idea that everyone modifies their body to some degree, regardless of gender identity — a detail other LGBTQ+ critics have praised. In an essay for MASSIVE Cinema, writer Xuanlin Tham likened the scenes of Vincent injecting himself to the scenes Alexia spends in front of the mirror, arguing that both characters are constantly coming to terms with the changes their bodies undergo against their will.
In their article, Dry also mentions a scene in which Alexia — fully disguised and passing as a man — watches a woman get sexually harassed by a group of men on a bus and does nothing. “Her gender play is a deception, a means to escape the cruelties of patriarchy: a deeply harmful and misguided criticism often leveled at trans men,” their critique reads. While it’s true that this misconception exists, I’d argue that the scene is less about that and more about reflecting the character’s fear of being uncovered in a potentially dangerous setting, which many trans and visibly queer people find all too familiar.
At the end of the day, Dry’s well-articulated criticisms aren't invalid, especially since the author is themselves a gender non-conforming individual writing from experience. My problem lies in the tendency people have to evaluate art purely through a socio-contemporary context — especially art that demands to be analyzed outside of our moral sensibilities.
Post-gender and post-feminist films exist, and these concepts are not nullified by the existence of real-life homophobia, transphobia or sexism. Quite the contrary: when a work of fiction asks us to accept a post-gender or post-feminist circumstance outside our realm of plausibility to suit its storytelling, it’s challenging audiences to imagine a more progressive world beyond our boundaries of comfort. Titane is not the only instance of this, with far more controversial films such as Paul Verhoeven’s rape revenge thriller Elle (2016) and Pedro Almodóvar’s aforementioned The Skin I Live In being examples of this. The latter is yet another instance of body horror being used as a vehicle for queer narratives.
The Skin I Live In centers on Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas), a wealthy plastic surgeon developing a new kind of synthetic skin; and Vera (Elena Anaya), the prisoner he experiments on. Much like any Almodóvar melodrama, information is teased to us bit by bit; the mystery behind Robert’s motives and Vera’s identity slowly unravelling over the course of the film. Eventually, it is revealed that the doctor’s wife commited suicide years ago after being disfigured in a horrible accident, leaving behind a daughter who experiences intense psychological trauma. Years later, the girl kills herself after getting date-raped by a man named Vicente (Jan Cornet) at a formal event her father also attends. Robert tracks Vicente down, kidnaps the young man and performs an involuntary gender reassignment surgery on him. Vicente is present-day Vera.
Although the story explores grey areas of consent, Vicente’s actions are very much inexcusable. Flashbacks of him incessantly pursuing a lesbian coworker and catching on to the doctor’s daughter’s mental instability before throwing himself onto her, suggest that an accident like this was bound to happen sooner or later because he had a hard time taking “no” for an answer. However, Robert’s revenge isn’t about teaching Vicente a lesson, but about having power over him.
Some time before her suicide, his daughter develops an incurable fear of men, thereby associating her own father with the assault. Robert is indignant at this, but he ends up proving her right through the oppressive power structure he creates for Vera, quickly becoming much worse than Vicente ever was. When Robert falls in love with Vera (who he designs to look like his dead wife), Vicente realizes his freedom lies in seducing the doctor to gain his trust and eventually escape. In doing so, Vicente/Vera goes from being a sexual abuser to being a victim of physical, psychological and sexual abuse themselves.
It’s easy to understand how some might find this film offensive, and it certainly wouldn’t be my place to tell trans people how to feel about it — especially considering how more problematic and less nuanced films like The Assignment (2016) and Sleepaway Camp (1983) have used the concept of forced gender reassignment to harmful effect. However, it’s also worth mentioning that more than a few queer and trans critics have made the case for The Skin I Live In as a compelling exploration of gender dysphoria.
Despite having Vera’s body, Vicente continues to refer to himself as a man when he’s not being complacent to Robert. In flashbacks, he’s shown having instances of bottom dysphoria and destroying the women’s clothing Robert buys him in fits of rage. Through the doctor’s perverse experiment, Vicente is placed in a marginalized individual’s shoes through the patriarchal nightmare that was created for him, and spends the rest of the film fighting to regain autonomy over his own body.
It’s safe to assume that this allegory wouldn’t have worked in the hands of a lesser auteur. But as a gay man and as someone otherwise known to celebrate trans identity onscreen (see: Law of Desire, High Heels, All About My Mother… etc.), Almodóvar handles the subject matter deftly. Amidst the repeal of Roe v. Wade and ongoing fiscal threats to trans people’s heath across the United States, his thesis also feels especially relevant in 2022.
Classism and misogyny (which play an active, contributing factor to women’s and LGBTQ+ folks’ oppression in real life), are explored through other characters in The Skin I Live In as well. Most notably, Robert’s maid and mother, Marilia (Marisa Paredes), is as much an antagonist as he is. Through her coddling of Robert (among other things), she plays a part in endorsing and upholding the patriarchal and classist power structures that oppress Vera, despite very much being a victim of these herself. It’s a reflection of a larger, insidious pattern that’s deeply rooted in Hispanic and Latino cultures and exacerbates machismo.
The many sexual assault sequences in this film have also become a point of contention over the years. I’ve always maintained that depiction does not equal endorsement. By dismissing films that accurately portray sexual assault, we dismiss the reality of these occurrences, which disproportionally happen to marginalized people. By refusing to engage in transgressive art beyond surface-level critiques from the limited bounds of some modern-day internet doctrine, we deprive ourselves from the work of pioneering artists whose endeavors have allowed us to come as far as we have. To wave Almodóvar away as a misogynist because some of his films challenge our boundaries of comfort, would be to ignore a career-worth of trailblazing cinema that reveres women and LGBTQ+ folks.
This takes me back to Ducornau’s statement that protagonists don’t have to be morally sympathetic for a story to be effective, or even relatable. Similarly, queer art does not have to subscribe to heteronormative ideals to be progressive. And just as no one’s under any obligation to consume media that makes them uncomfortable, art does not owe us anything either.